Tuesday, 5 October 2010

PACE Rapporteur Calls for National Application of ECHR Case-Law

Speaking at a conference in the Macedonian capital Skopje last week, Christos Pourgourides, chair of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly stressed the need for parliaments and national judges to take more account of the jurisprudence of the Court. He emphasized that they should even do so when the case law relates to other countries facing the same issue. To illustrate this problem, he used the case of Marckx v. Belgium of 1979. According to the press release, Pourgourides talked about that "ruling against Belgium in 1979 that children born out of wedlock should not face discrimination, pointing out that France changed its law only after the Court made a similar ruling against it in 2000: “Twenty years lost for the victims of such discrimination, and many years of unnecessary litigation!” " Pourgourides also called for increased dialogue between the Court and state parties, e.g. through more third party interventiions by states.

See the press release here, the speech itself here, and the background document here.